Cryptographic protocols are the cornerstone of security in distributed
systems. The formal analysis of their properties is accordingly one of the
focus points of the security community, and is usually split among two groups.
In the first group, one focuses on trace-based security properties such as
confidentiality and authentication, and provides decision procedures for the
existence of attacks for an on-line attackers. In the second group, one focuses
on equivalence properties such as privacy and guessing attacks, and provides
decision procedures for the existence of attacks for an offline attacker. In
all cases the attacker is modeled by a deduction system in which his possible
actions are expressed. We present in this paper a notion of finitary deduction
systems that aims at relating both approaches. We prove that for such deduction
systems, deciding equivalence properties for on-line attackers can be reduced
to deciding reachability properties in the same setting.Comment: 30 pages. Work begun while in the CASSIS Project, INRIA Nancy Grand
Es